The variety and use of electronic devices, especially portable electronic devices such as cellular telephones, laptop computers, and personal digital assistants (PDAs), has dramatically increased in recent years. Many electronic devices, in addition, communicate with other electronic devices. For example, cellular telephones use base stations to route and amplify data transmission. When designing communication devices used in portable electronic devices, various considerations are taken into account when designing the transmitter and receiver used for transmitting and receiving signals containing the data.
One such consideration is power consumption, which affects battery lifetime. In the receiver of a portable electronic device, the received signals are provided to multiple modules, each of which consumes power when operational. One of these modules is a low noise amplifier. The amplifier is used to amplify the signals for further processing if the portable electronic device is far from the transmission origin (e.g. base station) to boost the signal strength to adequate levels to be used by downstream modules. If the portable electronic device is sufficiently close to the transmitter origin, the received signals may be strong enough such that gain provided by the amplifier may be reduced or eliminated. Regardless of the amount of gain, the input impedance of the amplifier, i.e. the amount of impedance experienced by the signals provided to the input, should be the same to enable the same matching network to be used in both the situations.